Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] [Press]: Caravan article: Fact Check

[Gautam John]

On 31 March 2012 22:51, Srikanth Ramakrishnan 
wrote:

> I really didn't like the write up at all.
> It seemed a bit sarcastic.
> Not something that would help our movement will it?

Not something we can control, no? That's the way the media rolls. And
it's not that we can do without them either.

Thank you.

Best,

Gautam

http://blog.prathambooks.org/p/social-media.html

___
Wikimediaindia-l mailing list
Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit 
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l

Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] [Press]: Caravan article: Fact Check

[Srikanth Ramakrishnan]

I really didn't like the write up at all.
It seemed a bit sarcastic.
Not something that would help our movement will it?

On Sat, Mar 31, 2012 at 1:03 AM, Noopur  wrote:

> Dear all,
> Here  is a story by
> this reporter who attended the Delhi meet up. Caravan folks had been
> contacting us for a while regarding 'Wikipedia meet ups' and finally their
> reporter Krishn landed up at the 7th meet up. Just a heads up, these are
> entirely his observations and even the quotes are not verbatim. He's
> paraphrased what he heard us say. Subha will agree. Anyway, it's a good
> piece on an outsider's perspective of Wikipedia outreach.
>
> Also, it happens almost always that journalists are clueless about the
> Wiki universe and end up misquoting facts, figures, terms. Maybe a
> journalist outreach session or inviting them to attend an entire editing
> session could remedy this?
>
> [1] http://caravanmagazine.in/Story.aspx?StoryId=1345
>
> --
>
> *FACT CHECK: Krishn Kaushik*
>
>
>
>
> *BALADEVAN RANGARAJAN m**oved his brown beanbag to the centre of the
> room, closer to the round wooden table on which lay a Macbook. He wasn’t
> well acquainted with the laptop’s keyboard, so he used a wireless one
> instead. A wall-mounted flat screen TV transmitted the Macbook’s display to
> a gathering of 14 seated around the unadorned room.*
> *The first step, he instructed the attendees, was to create a Wikipedia
> account. It was this year’s first summertime meeting for Wikipedia Meetup
> Delhi (WMD7, to be exact), and most in attendance were newcomers. Launched
> in 2010, the meetups have helped train aspiring Wikipedians in Delhi the
> art of editing Wikipedia entries about India. *
> *
> While registering for an account, Rangarajan tried typing ‘baladevan’ for
> his username twice—but a prompt informed him that it was already being used
> by someone else. He tried ‘baladevan.rangarajan’ next, and this time the
> system accepted.
>
> Asked by the website to introduce himself to other Wikipedia users in the
> form of a short description, Rangarajan, with side-parted hair and thick
> eyebrows that slope inwards, typed that he was a public policy researcher
> who “loves kids and freedom”. Sweet and grand.
>
> With the formality over, Rangarajan opened his first Wikipedia page as an
> editor: one about Pav Bhaji. The opening sentence read: “‘Pav Bhaji’
> (Marathi) is a fast food dish that originated in Marathi cuisine, and is
> native to Maharashtra and is popular in most metropolitan areas in India,
> particularly in Gujarat.”
>
> Suspicious, he noted that Pav Bhaji is not just famous in the
> metropolitan areas of Gujarat, but in cities in central and western India
> more generally.
>
> He confirmed his claim by citing Retail Franchising, a Tata McGraw Hill
> publication he found on Google Books that talks about the food’s popularity
> in central India. After all, for facts to hold, they require reliable
> sources.
>
> And so he rephrased the sentence: “Pav Bhaji (Marathi) is a fast food
> dish that originated in Marathi cuisine. It is native to Maharashtra and is
> popular in most metropolitan areas in India, especially in those of central
> and western Indian states such as Gujarat.”
>
> Much better; everybody else agreed. Rangarajan had just established a
> fact internationally. And, now, nobody would doubt it.
>
> The Wikipedia Foundation’s office, where Rangarajan had established Pav
> Bhaji’s regional specificity, is situated in a non-descript building in
> Hauz Khas. On a door three floors above the street, a wooden nameplate—each
> letter framed in a small wooden square—reads WIKIPEDIA. Inside are two
> rooms each with white walls and five workstations: airy and minimalist like
> the website. The foundation currently has five people on staff, two of
> which were at the meetup: Subhashish and Nupur.
>
> “We belong to diverse backgrounds,” Subhashish had said before the meetup
> began when there were only four people in the room. Of the 15 Wikipedians
> present by the end of the session, at least 11 had been trained as
> engineers, including Subhashish.
>
> Noopur said that women were underrepresented in the community
> globally—there were just three present at WMD7.
>
> “Thank god! We would have articles about shades of lipsticks otherwise,”
> blurted Abhishek, a lanky man with a goatee. Wikipedia was too serious to
> be “pink” for him. An engineering student from Ghaziabad, he described
> himself as a “write[r]” of poetry and philosophy, on his Wiki profile. “I
> have learnt everything from Wikipedia. More than from anyone else,” he
> added.
>
> As the group focused on the TV screen, which displayed the procedure to
> establish Pav Bhaji’s popularity in particular parts of India, a plump man
> with nascent whiskers—Roboture in his Wikipedian avatar—was surfing for
> more items to edit. An engineer from Jamia Millia Islamia, he surveyed the
> pages for ‘Poha’, ‘Dahi Bhalla